Hyper-V and VDI on Nutanix: Part 1

If you’re a regular visitor to the blog you know that I have lived in the lands of VMware VDM, View, Horizon and probably whatever the next name is. I wanted to deploy Remote Desktop Services on Hyper-V since requests from the field has started to come since we announced support for Hyper-V.

You still get the same quick time to value as you did from vSphere deployments on Nutanix, not a lot of changes it that department. Nutanix engineers did add some deployments scripts that automate adding the cluster to the domain and to SCCVM if present.
The first step is to clone the servers for the Remote Desktop Connection Broker Role, Remote Desktop Gateway Role and one server for the Desktop Desktop Licensing Role.

The second step is adding the Remote Desktop Virtualization Host role to all of the Hyper-V hosts. I did this by using the server manager from the virtual machine which will eventually get the Remote Desktop Connection Broker role. Don’t reboot the hosts as it will take down the cluster if you all using all of your Nutanix nodes for the VDI cluster. Select Install and then you go back and reboot them following the proper Nutanix guidelines.

After you have added the host roles you can walk thru the automated wizard to finish the rest.

Add RolesRemote Desktops Services Installation

Add the Connection Broker

Add Server for Web Access
This will end up be the server with the gateway role.Add all of your Nutanix Nodes that you want to use to host desktopsDeploy
Go ahead and select the checkbox to reboot if needed. Since the host role has already been added you are good to go. The host will not get rebooted.

This work was done inside the Nutanix Hosted POC environment. If your interested in taking a spin, sign up here!